- TX: Judge removed from track meet stabbing case as defendant Karmelo Anthony seeks a new trial
Source: Associated Press
“The judge in the case of a Texas teenager convicted of fatally stabbing a 17-year-old athlete at a high school track meet was ordered removed Wednesday, as the defendant seeks a new trial in a case that drew national attention. Karmelo Anthony, now 19, was convicted of murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison after a suburban Dallas jury in June rejected his claims of self-defense during a confrontation with Austin Metcalf in the stadium bleachers last year. … A new judge will be assigned for Thursday’s hearing on Anthony’s request for a retrial. Anthony’s legal team argued Wednesday that a retrial is needed in part because [District Judge John] Roach enforced overly strict courtroom rules and gave an interview after the trial was over.” (08/19/26)
- Nord Stream: Second suspect arrested over pipeline blasts
Source: Deutsche Welle [German state media]
“A second suspect has been arrested in relation to the Nord Stream gas pipeline explosions in 2022, German prosecutors said on Wednesday. Croatian police, acting on a European arrest warrant, detained a Ukrainian national in Pula. ‘The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office had Ukrainian Vladimir Z. arrested in Pula (Croatia) by local police forces,’ prosecutors said. They said that the man, a trained scuba diver, ‘is strongly suspected of jointly causing explosions.’ The prosecutors said they were pursuing the man’s extradition from Croatia. He is reported to have previously been detained in Poland in September 2025 but was released after an extradition request from Germany was turned down. Another suspect, also a Ukrainian national, was arrested in Italy last year.” (08/19/26)
https://www.dw.com/en/nord-stream-second-suspect-arrested-croatia/a-78427413
- Israel: Military orders criminal investigations into killings of 5-year-old Hind Rajab and 15 others in Gaza
Source: CBS News
“The Israeli military has ordered a criminal investigation into the killing by its forces of 5-year-old Hind Rajab, a Palestinian girl whose death in Gaza sparked international outrage after a recording of her final, heart-wrenching moments speaking to paramedics was heard around the world. In a statement Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces acknowledged for the first time that troops opened fire on the vehicle carrying Rajab’s family in January 2024, having previously said no forces were in the area at the time. … The military said it was also ordering a criminal investigation into the March 2025 killing of 15 Gazans, including rescue workers. The investigations will be conducted by Israeli military police.” (08/19/26)
- CT: Spared execution eight times, oldest inmate in US dies at 101
Source: BBC News [UK state media]
“Francis Clifford Smith was given his last meal eight times. But after being spared execution each time, he went on to be regarded as the longest serving prisoner in the US before dying in June at 101 years old. Convicted of murder in 1950 when he was 25, he always maintained his innocence, those who knew him told the BBC. Andrius Banevicius, the public information officer for Connecticut’s Department of Correction, recounted how Smith used to feed the birds while in Osborn prison, earning him the nickname The Birdman of Osborn. ‘He would stuff as much bread as he could … in his clothing’, Banevicius said, adding: ‘Everyone kind of turned a blind eye to it because they knew he was just feeding the birds’. Smith was a young petty criminal when he was accused in 1949 of the murder of Grover Hart, a night watchman at a Connecticut yacht club.” (08/19/26)
- Libertarian Party: Judicial Committee Upholds New Hampshire Disaffiliation
Source: Third Party Watch
“After deliberation in executive session, the Judicial Committee rose at 9:57PM on August 17, 2026 (last night) to consider the question in the matter of the disaffiliation of the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire. The vote was conducted as a roll call vote. Shall the National Committee’s revocation of affiliate party status of the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire be affirmed, or shall the Judicial Committee order reinstatement of the affiliate party? The vote was 7-0-0 to affirm the decision of the LNC. … All written opinions are due to be published no later than Sept 11, 2026.” (08/18/26)
- SC: National security question trips up Graham in debate
Source: SFGate
“Sen. Darline Graham stumbled in a Tuesday night debate over an elementary question about foreign policy, a signature issue of her late brother. It was a high-profile misstep a week before she faces a runoff election in her bid to hold onto the South Carolina seat to which she was appointed last month. Graham, a political novice, was asked whether the U.S. has a national security interest in Taiwan and the South China Sea — a longstanding contention of both Democratic and Republican administrations. She struggled to answer before admitting ‘national security is not my thing’. ‘I’m not that informed on national security,’ she added. Her rival in next week’s runoff for the GOP nomination, Rep. Ralph Norman, suggested the answer showed Graham was unqualified for the role. ” (08/19/26)
- France: Regime expels two Iranian diplomats in escalating row with Tehran
Source: Politico
“France will expel two Iranian diplomats after Tehran’s security services detained and interrogated two French Embassy staffers last month, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced Tuesday evening. The row dates back to July 19, when two French Embassy employees in Tehran — one of them the cultural attaché — were questioned for several hours and ‘beaten,’ according to Barrot. Paris accused Iranian security services of carrying out a ‘premeditated and deliberate’ act of intimidation in ‘flagrant violation’ of diplomatic protections, summoning Iran’s chargé d’affaires two days later. … Tehran disputes that account. Iran’s foreign ministry says the French diplomats violated the Vienna Convention through activities it considers interference in Iranian affairs and has since declared both persona non grata, barring them from returning to Iran after they left the country.” (08/19/26)
https://www.politico.eu/article/france-expels-2-iranian-diplomats-in-escalating-row-with-tehran/
- Inflation Is the State’s Contraceptive
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Angelo Monaco“From a pure free-market, Austrian, and public choice perspective, the long-term demographic decline of the native-born population is not an accidental social phenomenon. It is the predictable consequence of government growth, fiscal dominance, and irresponsible monetary expansion. When state spending exceeds tax revenues, the resulting deficits, inflation, and market distortions create structural disincentives that make multi-decade capital commitments—such as having and raising children—increasingly irrational for economic actors. From a strict market perspective, the declining birth rate of the domestic population is an unintended structural feedback loop of state expansion.” (08/19/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/inflation-is-the-states-contraceptive
- Can Antitrust Regulators Learn to Trust Consumers?
Source: The Daily Economy
by Tirzah Duren“Antitrust enforcement should preserve competition and respect consumer choice, not restrict both in pursuit of vague political goals.” (08/19/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/can-antitrust-regulators-learn-to-trust-consumers/
- AI data center opponents get water use argument all wrong
Source: USA Today
by Dace Potas“Data centers, the gigantic buildings that house the computing power behind the artificial intelligence boom, are wildly unpopular. A recent Gallup poll found that 7 in 10 Americans oppose one being built in their area. Most of those objections don’t hold up. In town after town, data centers have delivered real benefits to the communities willing to host them. Local officials should be welcoming these projects, not passing laws to keep them out.” (08/19/26)
- Actions more important than words
Source: Eastern New Mexico News
by Kent McManigal“To discover who someone is, you have to pay attention to what they do, not what they say. Words are cheap, and lies come easy. This goes triple for government. A government that talks about your safety but does things that will make you less safe is not on your side.” (08/19/26)
- Trump’s Dictator Envy Is Once Again on Display in Tiff with South Korea
Source: Reason
by JD Tuccille“President Donald Trump’s decision to ‘substantially reduce’ joint military exercises between the armed forces of the United States and those of South Korea captures the distilled essence of the nation’s current chief executive in its combination of petulance and affection for autocrats. On the one hand, he wants to punish our allies in the Republic of Korea for withholding support for the U.S. war with Iran. Especially, though, he wants to avoid offending the communist dictator of North Korea by training alongside our democratic and relatively free allies on the Korean peninsula. … Unfortunately, Trump has a history of turning against our friends and maintaining a soft spot for those hostile to American values.” (08/19/26)
- Prediction markets at odds with US mood on gambling
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff“Public acceptance of gambling has fallen among Americans, a shift best illustrated by the number of recent victories by states to curb the burgeoning industry of prediction markets, the practice of wagering on the outcomes of future events. Last week, for example, a judge in Washington state cited the online platform Kalshi for deceptive marketing of ‘illegal gambling activities’. The company is now blocked from offering ‘event contracts’ to consumers who wager on predictions in ‘sports, elections, politics, entertainment, culture, tech and science’. The ruling was pretty easy, as the state defines gambling as ‘staking or risking something of value upon the outcome of a contest of chance or a future contingent event not under the person’s control or influence’. It follows other successful efforts in several states against operators of prediction markets.” (08/18/26)
- What Will Come of Trump’s Radical Remaking of the Presidency?
Source: The UnPopulist
by Francis Fukuyama“As we move toward the end of the Trump era, we need to reckon with the changes his administration has wrought in the American system of government. The most significant is the enormous concentration of power, not just in the executive branch as a whole, but in the office of the president. Any successor administration, Republican or Democratic, will inherit these powers, and will have to decide how it wants to define the limits of executive authority in the future.” (08/19/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/what-will-come-of-trumps-radical
- Americans Don’t Deserve Liberty or Safety
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger“Benjamin Franklin pointed out a truth that should be highly discomforting to 21st-century Americans: ‘Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.’ Why discomforting? Because that’s exactly what both 20th-century and 21st-century Americans have done.” (08/19/26)
https://www.fff.org/2026/08/19/americans-dont-deserve-liberty-or-safety/
- Today In Dystopia: “We Have Cameras Everywhere In That Town”
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone“Today in dystopia, police have been wrongfully arresting people based on faulty information from AI-assisted Flock surveillance footage instead of actually investigating the evidence of the crime. In an article titled ‘She Spent 7 Months in Legal Hell After Cops Used Flock Surveillance To Identify the Wrong Car’, Reason Magazine documents multiple instances of innocent people having their lives upended in legal battles because police slammed them with charges based on incorrect Flock camera data which could have easily been ruled out by some basic verification. … Reason shared a police body cam video of a cop confidently handing a court summons to a woman for package theft, telling her and her husband that it was ‘100 percent certain’ she was guilty because Flock surveillance had her on camera committing the crime.” (08/19/26)
- Bisonomics
Source: Property and Environment Research Center
by Brian Yablonski“Private bison ranchers turned a symbol of the American West into one of conservation’s greatest success stories.” (08/19/26)
- Escaping the Educational Industrial Complex
Source: American Greatness
by Larry Sand“The recently released EdChoice ‘Schooling in America’ survey finds that 56 percent of parents believe K-12 education is on the wrong track. Indeed, too many traditional American public schools are failing to fulfill their role. Parental unhappiness is certainly understandable, given that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), aka the ‘Nation’s Report Card’, showed that in 2024, 12th-grade students scored their lowest in reading and math in decades. In math, 45 percent of high school seniors scored ‘below basic,’ the lowest level since 2005. In reading, 32 percent scored ‘below basic’, the lowest level since the exam’s inception in 1992. Among 8th-graders, 38 percent scored ‘below basic’ in science, meaning they couldn’t recognize basic facts, such as the fact that plants need sunlight to grow.” (08/19/26)
https://amgreatness.com/2026/08/19/escaping-the-educational-industrial-complex/
- John Hinckley Jr., Assassination Chic, and the Troubling Legacy of the Insanity Defense
Source: Independent Institute
by K Lloyd Billingsley“As Hinckley returns to the spotlight, his release raises questions about justice and the consequences of political violence.” (08/19/26)
- Progressives [sic] Are Winning Because What They Support Is Extremely Popular [sic]
Source: The Guardian
by US Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT)“The media pundits have written article after article desperately trying to understand why progressive candidates, despite being heavily outspent, keep defeating establishment Democrats in primaries around the country. Well, the answer is not complicated. Whether it is a corrupt campaign finance system, unprecedented income and wealth inequality, a broken and wildly expensive healthcare system, the enormous threats posed by AI or an immoral and destructive foreign policy, progressives are talking about the real issues facing working families. And they are providing real solutions. Establishment Democrats are not.” (08/19/26)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/19/poll-progressive-candidates-election-economy
- Atlas Shrugged and Interventionism
Source: EconLog
by Leonidas Zelmanovitz“In 1988, when I was 27 years old, I read Ayn Rand for the first time. It was her novel Atlas Shrugged, in its just-released Portuguese edition. At that time, I already considered myself a sort of classical liberal, but my superficial knowledge of political philosophy, among many other gaps in my education, made my convictions not very convincing. It was only after reading her that I gained the libertarian worldview I more or less hold to this day. Mind you, I was already in business and volunteering in the classical liberal movement in Brazil, but that was more of an irreflective reaction to being raised under a military dictatorship and then being governed by a left-leaning populist than the result of any deep thought.” (08/19/26)
https://www.econlib.org/econlog/atlas-shrugged-and-interventionism
- The Flock Camera Backlash Is a Very Good Sign
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Connor O’Keeffe“In a year as chaotic, violent, and economically destructive as this one has been, it is interesting that, to many Americans, the great villain of 2026 is turning out to be a traffic camera. But, indeed, we are seeing visceral, cross-partisan opposition to so-called Flock cameras—named after the leading manufacturer of these automated license plate readers—take hold in communities across the country. And that opposition is, to be sure, entirely legitimate.” (08/19/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/flock-camera-backlash-very-good-sign
- Some Shattering Illusions of Our Declining Empire
Source: The American Conservative
by George D O’Neill Jr.“Now that the lofty 250th-anniversary rhetoric about the greatness of our country has faded, it is time to face the reality of our country’s actual behavior. The U.S. fashions itself as a generous and benevolent world leader enforcing the ‘rules-based order’—a deceptive construct used by globalist elites to bully other countries. The rules are arbitrarily changed to suit the bullies and are regularly fashioned into pretexts for military action against uncooperative nations. In short, it is a hoax, untethered from the principles and ideals of our founders.” (08/19/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/some-shattering-illusions-of-our-declining-empire/
- “Difference, Power & Oppression”: OSU Requires Students to Take Courses on How to “Disrupt” the “Systems of Oppression” in the United States”
Source: Jonathan Turley
by Jonathan Turley“As many criticize higher education for pursuing indoctrination over education, Oregon State University (OSU) appears to be doubling down on a mandatory woke curriculum. The university is under fire for its mandatory undergraduate courses on ‘Difference, Power & Oppression’ (DPO). Much of the rhetoric on the university’s website reads more like the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) than an institution of higher education. OSU requires all undergraduate students who enrolled after the summer of 2025 to complete two DPO courses as part of its Core Education curriculum, including ‘Difference, Power & Oppression Foundations’ and ‘Difference, Power & Oppression Advanced’. This is all part of what OSU calls a ‘core curriculum’ that teaches students to be ‘adaptive, proactive members’ of society to ‘build a better world’.” (08/19/26)
- The Tragedy of US Debt
Source: The Dispatch
by Kevin D Williamson“‘Borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry,’ wrote the 16th-century economist William Shakespeare, who went on to advise: ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.’ Americans, who like to talk about their Christian faith more than study it (‘The wicked person borrows and does not repay, but the righteous one is gracious and giving’) have twice elected the self-proclaimed ‘king of debt,’ an infamous deadbeat and serial bankrupt, as president of the United States, while entrusting the national purse strings to the control of his self-abasing toadies in Congress. That’s going about as well as you would imagine.” (08/19/26)
https://thedispatch.com/article/debt-gdp-interest-rates-trump-republicans/
- The Corporate Virtue Trap
Source: The Daily Economy
by Kimberlee Josephson“Businesses are increasingly judged by ethical scorecards. But when virtue becomes a target, firms learn to optimize the metric — crowding out what actually matters.” (08/19/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-corporate-virtue-trap/
- Reclaiming Reading
Source: Law & Liberty
by Lee Trepanier“This should be viewed as the single most important goal of formal education.” (08/19/26)
- Soho Forum Debate: Does Gun Control Make Us Safer?
Source: Reason
“Statistician Aaron Brown and gun policy scholar Robert Spitzer debate the resolution, ‘Until there is convincing evidence that government-imposed gun control brings a net reduction in harm, all legal restrictions on adult possession of guns should be abolished.'” (08/19/26)
https://reason.com/podcast/2026/08/19/does-gun-control-make-us-safer/
- Ron Paul Liberty Report, 08/19/26
Source: Ron Paul Liberty Report
“Good Night, Young American.” (08/19/26)
- Rising, 08/19/26
Source: The Hill
“Robby Soave gives his radar on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signing an executive order to impose strict guidelines on data center construction.” (08/19/26)
- The Fifth Column, episode 571
Source: The Fifth Column
“Clip Roulette w/ Dictators, Demons and Democracy.” (08/19/26)
https://www.wethefifth.com/p/clip-roulette-w-dictators-demons
- The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, 09/19/26
Source: The Dispatch
“Not Losing the Iran War | Interview: Hal Brands.” (09/19/26)
https://thedispatch.com/podcast/remnant/not-losing-the-iran-war-interview-hal-brands/
- Reason Interview: Kurt Andersen
Source: Reason
“Can America Survive Its Political Divide?” (08/19/26)
https://reason.com/podcast/2026/08/19/can-america-survive-its-political-divide/